Over the past couple of years the Netbook has been the talk of the town. With it’s Solid-State disk offerings, Multi-OS compatibility and ultra-portabliltiy; Netbooks have rocketed up the charts of cool gadgets as fast as ipods.
I’ve sampled two of these cute little beasts over the past 18 months. First up was the Asus Eee PC 701. One of, if not the first Netbook offering the full SSD experience. The build quality of this unit was superb and a quite remarkable performer. However the 7″ screen was useless and became very irritating very quickly.
The main purpose of the concept of the SSD Netbook was initially to provide the developing world with a $100 internet box. The price I don’t think ever got down to that level but yes, as an internet box it worked absolutely fine.

My 2nd Netbook offering came in the form of a Dell Mini 9. Boasting a bigger screen (a true 9″ yet only offering a max screen res of 1024 x 600) a much bigger and faster SSD (Runcore 32GB) and the lure of a stable Hackintosh build, I really thought this was going to be a dream machine, maybe even a Macbook killer if that was at all possible.
My goal was to have the Netbook to function, operate and perform as good as any other Laptop based DAW; with of course the added plus of SSD Technology
First of all I stuck XP on it to see how my old Legacy of Windows apps would run, Cubase in-particular. After about 5 minutes of getting the App installed and launched I realised this was a none-starter. It could barely cope with a couple of Audio tracks let alone any Virtual Instruments.
So XP got trashed to make way for OS X. The Hackintosh route was a doddle. All documented from THIS FORUM. A totally smooth install and within 1 hour I was on a stable 10.5.6 build with everything working and Garageband and Final Cut Express installed for a bit of testing.
The performance was actually OK with both of these Apps. Garageband (as dull as it is) could cope with the Audio recording and Final Cut Express happily rendered some imported HD Video footage (although HD Video Capture doesn’t work due to the single core processor limitations)

Well, although they worked (ish) it’s hardly a contender to replace the Macbook. My dearly beloved Pro Tools 8 would never lower itself to function in a viable working state on the Mini 9. Add to that the limitations with the screen res (max 1024 x 600) which really does goof up 90% of your apps, it all starts to stack up towards another glorified internet browsing box.
So that’s it for me and Netbooks for the time being anyway. I can see in a couple of years a Core 2 Quad (or better no doubt) 10″ SSD based Netbook with an Expresscard slot creeping into the limelight and fulfilling all of my expectations.
Until then though, it’s Apple or nothing for me.